Episode 322 of The String opens at Skinny Dennis, the impressive new honky tonk that opened in March on Gallatin Road and which I wrote about last month. In its neon glow stood Vincent Neil Emerson, a stout fellow with a youthful face and a proper hat, fronting a five-piece hard country band. At first, they seemed tightly wound to the song forms of Emerson’s lonesome laments and twanging tales, but as the night wore on, they got into some grooving covers like The Band’s “Ophelia” and The Dead’s “Brown Eyed Women,” and they started to cook. The old-time tune “Mountain Dew” came alive with Ian Taylor Sutton’s steel guitar.
Emerson packed the place on two consecutive nights as part of his ongoing touring supporting his 2023 album The Golden Crystal Kingdom. While the album isn’t hot off the press, I’d been enjoying it and his prior, self titled release from 2021, so I’d been hoping he would swing through town for a conversation. It seemed pressing, because those albums were produced by roots stars Shooter Jennings and Rodney Crowell respectively, and not because Emerson called them, but vice versa. They heard what I hear - a man processing his past and making his struggles universal, a singer with an honest voice and a distinct point of view.
He tells me he likes how things have been going of late, with more sold out shows and more theaters. “I've just been doing it for a long time now,” Emerson says. “I started when I was 20 years old. I started playing bars and stuff in Fort Worth, sneaking by and sneaking drinks and stuff like that. And I got lucky and met some really nice people that took me on tour. And one of those guys was Colter Wall. He took me out, and I toured all over the states with him, and I think a lot of people found out about me.”
The events of Emerson’s challenged early life are candidly if grimly recounted in his 2021 song “Learnin’ To Drown.” His father’s suicide, his time living in his car, and his own struggles to live come through with lightning bright poetry. “Well I thought about closin' the door/ And endin' it all/ Like my father did before,” he sings. Listen to it and imagine having the courage to write it - or to sing it for Rodney Crowell in the runup to recording the self-titled album.
“Ever since I found Townes VanZandt’s music, I always knew that that's what you're supposed to do - lay it all on the line,” he tells me. “Because if you're not telling the truth, like, what's the point? And sometimes it's really hard to do that.”
Working with Shooter Jennings (an experience he speaks about glowingly), Emerson cooked up another song that operates like a guiding light for The Golden Crystal Kingdom. “Time Of The Rambler” is an ode to a kind of American freedom that gave us Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac. Some have traded it for the trappings of wealth and cloistered lives. Others are just trapped.
“A lot of us songwriters romanticize that era of like, you know, the rambler, the drifter,” Emerson says. “And I think it's funny sometimes - and I'm guilty of it too - but we have the most structured lifestyle. As a touring musician, you have to be checking into hotels on time. You have to load in on time. I guess we could just drop everything and just take a guitar and hop on a train.”
